1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic translator apparatus in which synonymous words or sentences of plural languages are correspondingly stored, and translation is executed by properly reading out these words or sentences.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a conventional electronic translator apparatus, desired title data is read out from a language memory by the operation of a category key. The title data is translated, for example, from Japanese into English, by the operation of a translation key, and is displayed. More specifically, first a desired field (e.g. sport) is selected by a category key, then desired title data (e.g. ) is selected from the field, and it is translated and displayed in other language (e.g. opening ceremony) by the operation of a translation key.
In the conventional electronic translator apparatus, however, only the title data can be translated, and it The explanatory data accompanying the title data (for example, when the title data is the opening ceremony, the detailed data about the title data such as the date of opening and the time of opening) cannot be translated, and the contents of the translation are limited, making the conventional device poorly practicable.
In certain portable electronic translator apparati, it is possible to translate in three languages, such as Japanese, Korean and English. In such apparatus, for example, in the Japanese-Korean translation mode for translating from Japanese into Korean, first a desired word to be translated is selected by a key input operation. As a result, the desired Japanese word is displayed. Afterwards, by pressing the translation key, the corresponding Korean word is displayed. Similarly, in the Korean-English translation mode for translating from Korean into English, the Korean word selected by the key input operation can be translated into an English word by the similar key input operation.
In such translator apparatus, although the selected word can be translated into a desired language, the corresponding words of two languages cannot be displayed simultaneously without performing an additional translation operation. That is, if it is desired to compare a word of a specific language with a corresponding word in an other language, the addition translation operation was always necessary, and the operation was complicated
In a portable small-sized electronic translator apparatus, a key input part and a display part are provided In such translator apparatus, a preliminarily stored word or sentence can be read out and displayed in the display part by the operation of the key input part, and synonymous words or sentences between desired languages can be translated.
The displayed part built in such translator apparatus is limited in the display capacity for one screen portion in order to reduce the size of the entire apparatus. Therefore, if a preliminarily stored sentence exceeds the display capacity of one screen, the whole sentence cannot be displayed at a time, and to read the whole sentence it is necessary to operate the key so as to scroll up the screen.
FIG. 1 is a diagram showing a display example in the prior art. As the words to be displayed in the display part, for example " " is selected, and the display becomes as shown in FIG. 1 (1). If a sentence starting with these words is selected " ", the display becomes as shown in FIG. 1 (2). At this time, of the words other than the subject words initially shown as the title data (enclosed by double acute brackets in the illustration), only " " is displayed, and it is impossible to predict the whole sentence from this display screen Therefore, the whole sentence cannot be read unless the screen is scrolled up to confirm the succeeding words of the sentence
Meanwhile, in the example sentence composition operation by example sentence function capable of composing plural sentences relating to one a word corresponding to a noun, to search for a desired example sentence, sentences are fed and displayed sequentially one by one. However, when the display capacity of the example sentences is large, the key operation for scrolling up is frequent, and the retrieval time is longer.
In other electronic translator apparatus, a word in a specific language (e.g. Japanese) and a corresponding sentence are combined and stored as one conversational sentence, and the stored conversational sentence is displayed. The displayed conversational sentence is translated into a conversational sentence in other language (e.g. Korean) and displayed. For example, the following conversational sentences are stored and displayed.